Early on in her days in Congress, Sen. Lisa Murkowski was trying to make her point to former President George Bush’s administration that the No Child Left Behind legislation simply would not work in rural Alaska.
That law as written would allow children in failing schools to attend the nearest successful school instead, but what if the failing school was in rural community like Savoonga, and the other option was a school in Nome, 165 air miles away?
To make that point in 2003, Murkowski invited former Secretary of Education Rod Paige to come with her to Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island, to show him what rural really means in Alaska.
“I learned a key lesson for getting things done in Washington for my Alaska constituents,” Murkowski writes in her new book, with Alaska writer Charles Wohlforth, “Far From Home: An Alaskan Senator Faces the Extreme Climate of Washington D.C.”
“Washington people needed to see for themselves,” Murkowski writes. “Our Alaskan lives were too different, too far from their experience, too far from home, for them to really imagine the impact of our problems.”
Since that time, Murkowski has made a habit of bringing as many government employees as possible, members of Congress and others, to the 49th state to see for themselves the challenges of getting stuff done in rural Alaska – from weather conditions that make getting there impossible, to the huge financial costs.
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., she has been working for more than two decades on the delicate balance of, in her words, sticking by one’s principles, abiding by the Constitution, and working with adversaries to serve Alaska as best she can.
Now in 2025, the Alaska Republican shows no signs of changing course, despite the political, mental, and sometimes physical dangers of the job.
In the ninth chapter of her book, Murkowski describes in vivid detail the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob came into the U.S. Capitol to try and stop a joint session of Congress from certifying the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election. Members of Congress had to flee for their own safety but returned hours later to certify the election.
That done, Murkowski and her friend Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, were up far into the night at Murkowski’s house there, trying to process the extraordinary event, which Murkowski said President Donald Trump was instrumental in inciting with his supporters.
Murkowski has little good to say about Trump, whom she has never voted for, and whom she credits with a style of politics she has resisted for years.
Still, she has said many times she will work with him for the benefit for her home state. A self-described moderate Republican, she says she never lets Trump get to her, although clearly no love is lost between them.
When he first pursued the presidency, she said, “no one in my circle thought he had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the nomination.”
That battle is still ongoing, with Trump in the midst of his second term as president and Murkowski in her fifth term in the Senate, a term that runs through 2028. And at this point she shows no sign of stopping.
The book is the senator’s way of educating readers on where she comes from, her family, her faith, and how and why she votes. For those who have never traveled to rural Alaska, the book is also a guide on the challenges of bringing here what most everyone else takes for granted.
At the heart of her book, Murkowski continues to try and explain how and why Alaska is different and how Alaskans see things differently from those in the continental “Lower 48.” (An example, albeit not in her book, was the experience of a group of rural Alaska Native youths who were interviewed on their first trip to the “Lower 48,” and expressed surprise “that the forests were empty.” To these students from the Alaska Interior, the forests around their community were places full of wildlife where they hunted for food.)
In the epilogue of the book, Murkowski talks about how democracy must be renewed from the ground up, with the public in charge. It is her sense of responsibility, she said, that drives her work and explains the purpose of her writing the book.
Her prescription to fix American politics, she writes, is to simply get involved – from school boards and town councils to other hometown entities that are at the roots of American democracy.
And her advice to her colleagues in Congress: Do the work, and don’t worry so much about keeping your job.
